Make/Believe (Teeth)

Ten million channels and nothing but noise.

We’re expressing ourselves through more channels than ever
before, but what are we saying? That might well be the question driving
this riveting new contemporary dance work by Portland performance
company Teeth, which debuts this week. In it, two men (Philip Elson and
Noel Plemmons) and two women (Molly Sides and Shannon Stewart) embody
the image manipulation, incessant chatter and selective hearing of the
information age. Well-articulated unisons give way to self-conscious
posturing, rough partnering and the herky-jerky movement of wind-up
toys. Some of the imagery is provocative, and much of it is
intentionally unpretty, although the dancers, with their technical chops
and laserlike focus, do it beautifully. Their onstage vocals, from
mumbles to yelps, are also manipulated as part of the ambient score,
which is partially prerecorded and partially digitized live, cocooning
the audience in white noise.

Local dance presenter White Bird has commissionedMake/Believe,
with choreography by co-director Angelle Hebert and music by her
composer and partner Phillip Kraft. This is not the first time Hebert
and Kraft have tackled identity and communication issues. A previous
work, Grub, drew inspiration from the time they found themselves
emailing each other from laptops perched on the same table. Since its
2006 inception, the company has moved from elaborately staged shows
toward the more emotionally raw aesthetic of their 2010 duet, Home Made, which White Bird cofounder Paul King described as “an earnest depiction of who they are.”

Hebert and Kraft
continue to peel away artifice in part, they say, because they’d like to
tour internationally (less baggage or all kinds makes you more
attractive to promoters), but also out of a desire to communicate more
effectively with viewers, and with each other.

For her part, Hebert
is reluctant to discuss the work before its debut, for fear of feeding
viewers preconceived ideas. But, she added with a laugh, “We can talk
afterward.”